After Libya, Egypt. Schlein’s Democratic Party accuses itself. And Guerini says: “It seems to me a school assembly”

At one point the discussion took on such frantic tones that Lorenzo Guerini shook his head somewhere between consternation and incredulity: “Well… I seem to hear a school assembly”. And in truth no: what the president of Copasir was witnessing was the internal debate of the Democratic Party, and in this case the declaration of that Annalisa Corrado, member of the secretariat of Elly Schlein, according to which “we are accomplices of bloodthirsty and liberticidal governments” . In the meantime, she was raving about giving it to Descalzi. And it emerged that a foreign policy problem exists at the Nazarene.

However, it was believed that the stumbling block, in the anxiety of moving the line of the Democratic Party to the left, would have been on the eastern front. Instead it was the Mediterranean, the center of the crisis. Because, despite the widespread “pacifist” brooding of her advisers on support for Ukraine, Schlein has remained firm on the Atlanticist path traced by Enrico Letta, apostasies begin in the Democratic Party as regards North Africa.

It happened, it was Sunday, that precisely in an attempt to explain how complex and often bumpy diplomatic relations are with the North African countries, Claudio Descalzi, speaking at the Forza Italia convention, claimed the successes of an energy policy that led the country to to get rid of Putin’s dependence on gas in an unimaginably rapid time. And it is here that Eni’s CEO uttered the offending sentence: “Egypt helped us by giving up its cargoes this summer to send them to Italy to fill the stocks. These are countries that if you give, you get”. Unfortunate sentence? Excessive display of Machiavellian realism? What is certain is that nothing required Schlein to cut out that declaration and mount a polemic on it. “Nothing, unless you consider the attention and coherence with which Elly has dedicated herself to Giulio Regeni’s cause for years”, point out, with pique, his staff. Be that as it may, the secretary insists: “I think Italy cannot consider Egypt’s lack of cooperation on Regeni’s murder as a price to pay on the altar of economic interests.” And that is enough to entice many representatives of the left wing of the party, the one close to the leader, to go wild with somewhat heated comments, perhaps an expression of that wishful thinking about legitimization which, in the opinion of the leaders of the Democratic Party, also and above all passes from denying what the Democratic Party has been in recent years.

Except, however, that some of these intemperate women have ended up giving foundation to the more or less conspiratorial readings of those who, in the M5s and beyond, have long insulted past and present elders of the Democratic Party. And in fact, if Guerini in judging the tweet by Corrado, energy manager of the Nazareno, chooses the detachment of irony (“It seems to me a school assembly …”), there are also those who, like Lia Quartapelle, think of being able to be included among “the accomplices of bloody regimes” just doesn’t fit. Because Italy, it must be said, managed the painful Regeni affair also through members of the Democratic Party: Paolo Gentiloni, so to speak, was Foreign Minister in the Renzi government, at the time of the Friulian researcher’s assassination. Should he be counted among the “accomplices”? And like him Renzi, and so, perhaps, Letta himself? And then Guerini, it goes without saying, and let alone Marco Minniti. And maybe even Erasmo Palazzotto, who as president of the Commission of Inquiry into Regeni hasn’t done enough? Or maybe that Nicola Zingaretti would be an accomplice who worked like him to cement an alliance with Giuseppe Conte at the time when “the very strong point of reference for Italian progressives” sold the Fincantieri frigates to the government of al Sisi? This is why Quartapelle, head of foreign affairs in Letta’s Democratic Party, now says that it is “sad and regrettable that the efforts that the Democratic Party has made in recent years in the search for the truth about Regeni are not valued, and that they prefer feed a controversy with such maximalist declarations that they do not help to understand tragic and complex phenomena”.

Less clear, if anything, is the judgment that the current dem foreign affairs manager has matured on the matter, that Peppe Provenzano who has become more enigmatic than usual since he took office. And in fact, it does not appear that he even commented on the other internal incident, the one that took place in the Chamber last week, when three dem exponents – Enzo Amendola, Marianna Madia and Quartapelle – refused to vote on an agenda promoted by Verdi and the Italian Left which preached the suspension of the agreements on migrants with Libya launched by the Gentiloni government. A worrying incident not so much for the size, in truth very small, of the mutineer patrol, but if anything for the fact that the entire dem group accepted to have its foreign policy dictated by another parliamentary component, in the heat of disowning himself. And there are those who will certainly say that here too, especially here, lies the meaning of Schlein’s mandate (and victory): to contradict what the Democratic Party has been up to now. And be it. Provided, however, that it doesn’t boil down to this: “an institute assembly”.

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• Valerio Valentini

• Born in L’Aquila, in 1991. Grew up in Collemare, up there in the Apennines. Classical high school diploma, degree in Modern Literature at the University of Trento. Al Foglio since 2017. I wrote a book, “Gli 80 di Camporammaglia”, published by Laterza, with which I won the Campiello Opera Prima award in 2018. I like good books and good cinema. And cycling, everything, even the bad stuff.